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Indian-born Gita Gopinath becomes the first woman to occupy IMF’s top post

Indian-born Gita Gopinath created history when she became the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). With this appointment, she becomes the 11th chief economist and first ever woman to occupy the post. The 47-year-old succeeds Maurice Obstfeld, who retired on December 31, 2018.

In an interview with the Harvard Gazette, Gopinath identified her top priorities as allowing the IMF to be a place that provides intellectual leadership on important policy questions. She said, “Among the research issues that I would like to push, one would be understanding the role of dominant currencies like the dollar in international trade and finance. We could do more on the empirical side to try to understand countries' dollar exposures and on the theoretical side in terms of the implications for international spillovers, consequences of dollar shortages, etc.”

Gopinath’s parent's TV Gopinath and VC Vijayalakshmi hail from Kerala, but the dynamic economist was born and brought up in Mysore. With a BA from Lady Shri Ram College for Women and Masters in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, she has also served as the economic adviser to the Chief Minister of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan. She completed her MA at the University of Washington, followed by a PhD at Princeton University. In 2014, she was named one of the top 25 economists under 45 by the International Monetary Fund.

Gopinath is the second Indian to become chief economist of the IMF, after Raghuram Rajan (also former RBI governor), who held the post from 2003-2006. She is married to former civil servant Iqbal Singh Dhaliwal, who is currently Executive Director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Poverty Action Lab. The couple has a teenage son, Rohil.